Paul Ford

Generative AI Is Totally Shameless. I Want to Be It

AI has a lot of problems. It helps itself to the work of others, regurgitating what it absorbs in a game of multidimensional Mad Libs and omitting all attribution, resulting in widespread outrage and litigation. When it draws pictures, it makes the CEOs white, puts people in awkward ethnic outfits, …

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Forget Growth. Optimize for Resilience

When you build software, you add little hooks into the code so that, as users open a window, tap a picture, upload a file, the code tattles on them, sending some of their data to another company's server. Log data is sowed; reports are reaped. This is known as “analytics” …

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To Own the Future, Read Shakespeare

many times a year, as if on a hidden schedule, some tech person, often venture-capital-adjacent, types out a thought on social media like “The only thing liberal arts majors are good for is scrubbing floors while I punch them” and hits Send. Then the poetry people respond—often a little late, …

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Why Tech Bros and Politicians Can’t Really Connect

Every few months we get to see a tech dude offer excruciating testimony to grumpy members of Congress. The tech dude tries, with varying degrees of arrogance, to explain his world; the congresspeople recite their questions; in the end, no one seems notably changed by the experience. There are many …

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